Pros

Cons

Bottom Line

The Oculus Rift headset delivers an impressive virtual reality experience with more compatible software than the HTC Vive, but it's still waiting on motion controls.

23 Aug 2017Will Greenwald

Editors' Note: This review has been updated to reflect the inclusion of the Oculus Touch controllers with the Rift, and the availability of the standalone headset at a lower price. The rating has not changed.

The retail version of the Oculus Rift virtual reality (VR) headset finally arrived in 2016, after multiple development kits and several years of work. Since then, the excellent Oculus Touch motion controllers have been added to the Rift as a single $598 bundle, slashing $100 each from the original price of both the headset and the controllers. The Oculus Rift remains functional and immersive, if you have a computer that can handle it. With the addition of the Oculus Touch controllers, the Rift is more appealing than the now almost identically priced HTC Vive, though the Sony PlayStation VR is our Editors' Choice for its ease of use and even lower price.

Before we get started, just a note that you can find the headset on its own for around $499, though we strongly recommend getting it with the Oculus Touch controllers. The controllers are available on their own for $99.

What You Need

Official requirements for the Rift are nearly identical to the requirements for the HTC Vive. Oculus recommends an Intel i5-4590 or better CPU, an Nvidia GTX 970 or AMD Radeon R9 290 or better video card, at least 8GB of RAM, an HDMI 1.3 output, three USB 3.0 ports, and one USB 2.0 port. One of those ports is for the additional sensor of the Oculus Touch controller, and you can set up the Rift itself with just two USB 3.0 ports: one for the headset and one for the external sensor. I tested it using the Origin EON17-X, which has a Core i7 6700K CPU overclocked to 4.5GHz, an 8GB GeForce GTX 980M graphics card, and 16GB of RAM.

Design

The Oculus Rift headset is simple and understated. It's a plain black rectangular visor with rounded edges and little visual flair. The front panel is completely flat, marked only with an Oculus logo. The sides of the visor are similarly flat, and connect to arms that pivot slightly up and down and attach to the three-strap harness for securing the device on your head.

A strap extends from each arm around the sides of your head, with a third strap extending from the top of the visor over the top of your head, meeting at a padded triangle in the back. The straps are held in place with hook-and-loop fasteners, and can be easily adjusted. A set of on-ear headphones sit on the arms, able to separately pivot and flip up and down to properly fit on your ears.

On its own, the headset is fairly light and comfortable. You can wear glasses with the Rift, but it will make the fit a bit tighter. I used my glasses when testing the headset, which helped ensure that I saw crisp and accurate visuals. But it also made putting the Rift on and taking it off a bit awkward, and depending on the size of your frames, they could hurt your ability to wear the headset for long periods of time.

The headset connects to your PC directly through a lengthy cable that splits off near the end into HDMI and USB 3.0 connectors. The cable winds down the left strap before running clear of the headset. It's a little more awkward than the over-the-top-of-the-head cable of the HTC Vive, and I found myself struggling to find a comfortable position where the cable didn't sit distractingly on my shoulder. But it's not nearly as big a concern in use as the HTC Vive's cable, since the Vive is designed to work when you're walking around a set area.

The Rift on its own uses a single external sensor, a black cylinder that sits on a nine-inch-tall metal desktop stand. The sensor can tilt up and down, and must be placed where it can maintain a clear view of the headset when in use. A second, identical sensor tracks the Oculus Touch controllers, and the two sensors work in tandem to improve tracking for all of the devices and cover a larger area than the stationary position just one sensor allows.

Once you're up and running, a 2,160-by-1,200 OLED panel is used to produce a 1,080-by-1,200 picture for each eye, separated by the lenses in the headset (just like the Vive). The lenses can be adjusted using a small lever on the right underside of the visor. More on the visual themselves in a bit.

Controls

The Oculus Touch motion controllers originally launched as an optional addition, but have since been added to the $598 Rift package. They aren't the only control options included in the box, though. The Oculus Remote is a small, rounded bar with a large, circular navigation pad and Back, Menu, and Up/Down buttons. The remote helpfully features a lanyard to keep it attached to your wrist when you're using the Rift. The Rift also includes an Xbox One wireless controller and a Microsoft Xbox Wireless Adapter for Windows with which you can use it, which is handy for VR games that use conventional, non-motion-based control schemes.

With the Oculus Touch controllers, the Rift's controls reach parity with the HTC Vive's, which has included motion controls out of the box since its launch. We go into more detail in our review of the Oculus Touch, but it's a very comfortable, natural-feeling control scheme with responsive physical components like analog sticks and face buttons in addition to motion tracking.

Setup

Setting up the Rift is simple. You need to download the Oculus setup software on your PC, which will then walk you through the relatively few steps necessary to get going. First, plug the headset and sensors into your computer, using an HDMI and three USB 3.0 ports. Second, sync the remote by pulling out the battery tab and pressing a button. Finally (and optionally), plug the Xbox One receiver into a USB 2.0 port and pair the gamepad with it. Once these steps are complete, you can slip the headset on and jump into the Oculus software.

At this point in the setup process, you can play any software available on the Oculus Store, but you can go further with relatively little hassle. By setting the Oculus software to load apps from unidentified sources, you can get the headset to work with SteamVR, just like the HTC Vive uses. The launch of Oculus Touch means you can now use all SteamVR games that support motion controls with the Rift. They register as HTC Vive motion controllers when you set them up for Steam, and work flawlessly with Vive-compatible games.

While the Rift now has motion controls, it doesn't quite support the same whole-room VR as the Vive. You can use it while sitting, standing, or within an area defined by the two sensors included with the Rift and Touch. It supports a smaller space than the Vive's wall-mountable sensors do, but this is a small sacrifice; since the HTC Vive is tethered to your connected computer with a cable just like the Rift, actually walking around with the headset on requires you to be very careful not to trip over the dragging wire. It's an immersion-breaker that hurts the experience of otherwise free movement in VR. The Rift's head tracking, along with Touch controller tracking, work very well within the space the sensors allow.

The Oculus Experience

The Rift shares the same resolution and refresh rate as the Vive, and as such the experience is very similar between the two. Like the Vive, the Rift produces a crisp picture with smooth motion and head tracking. In testing, the 3D effect of the stereoscopic images really gave me the sense that the virtual objects I was staring at were actually in front of me. Ultimately, the Rift headset is a display, so smoothness and graphical fidelity will depend on the power of your computer and sophistication of the software. In terms of hardware, though, the Rift produces a compelling virtual experience for the eyes.

I played a few VR titles available on the Oculus store, including EVE: Valkyrie, Farlands, and Lucky's Tale. I also tried Adventure Time: Magic Man's Head Games and Virtual Desktop, launched through SteamVR.

EVE: Valkyrie is the star of the launch titles for the Oculus Rift. It's an online, multiplayer space dogfighting game sent in the EVE universe. You play a cloned pilot who runs sorties with your squad against other, similar squads. It boils down to the space version of team deathmatch in any first-person shooter, but it's an engaging and fairly deep flight game.

The format is perfect for using the Rift while sitting. The view puts you in the cockpit of your chosen space fighter, and you can freely look around it while staying in place. The game itself is controlled with the Xbox One gamepad, piloting the ship with the dual analog sticks and firing with the triggers. Fundamentally, the VR aspect of the game is unnecessary; the experience is actually similar to playing a dogfighting game on a normal monitor, just with the ability to look freely around your cockpit (which doesn't offer any significant tactical advantage). However, the immersiveness the Rift offers in completely engulfing you in this cockpit perspective really makes the game feel more engaging and tense.

It isn't a complex economic MMO like EVE itself, and the style of combat is a bit arcade-like in how ships fly and fire, but it's enjoyable to fly around in space, shooting at people while they shoot at you. It feels like one of the most complete games made specifically with VR in mind.

Farlands is a xenobiological playground. You play a researcher on an alien planet, looking for new life forms. You can scan different creatures by staring at them, and improve your understanding of them by feeding them foods they want. It has a very mellow quality, looking for alien animals and watching them eat to slowly and steadily unlock new environments to explore. While the concept seems ideal for motion controls, it was simple to play with a conventional gamepad, using a reticle in the center of your view to highlight objects and move around.

Lucky's Tale is a standard cartoony third-person platformer where you control a cartoon fox as he runs through different levels trying to rescue his pet pig. It's an eye-catching experience that doesn't really need VR at all. Using the Rift in a game like this lets you look around easily from your above-the-action point of view. However, you can't readily move the camera to get a better view of a given position relative to the character you're controlling, which proved to be very frustrating when trying to get Lucky to collect lines of coins set in specific arcs in 3D space; without the ability to pan around Lucky, I couldn't easily align my jumps.

Our review of the Oculus Touch goes into detail of what Oculus Rift games that support Touch are like, but to summarize the experience, the optional Touch controllers make things like spray-painting walls, aiming guns, and using telekinetic powers feel very natural.

SteamVR

I ran Adventure Time: Magic Man's Head Games (ATMMHG) on SteamVR to see if the Rift could handle it as smoothly as the Vive does. While SteamVR isn't the Rift's native platform, it displayed the interface and loaded the game perfectly, and I found it was just as smooth and immersive as it is on the Vive (though, like with Lucky's Tale, the actual value of playing said third-person platformer in VR is still questionable).

I also tried Virtual Desktop, a program that projects your computer's screen in front of you in virtual space. It was just as functional and intriguing as it was with the HTC Vive, showing my monitor as a giant, curved display around me. The software can also generate a flat screen, and even show your desktop view as a television mounted on the wall of a home theater. It's a handy way to make VR useful, even without VR-specific software. If you want to watch a video and it's not available on a client for the Oculus Rift or on SteamVR, you can just load it with Virtual Desktop.

The only downside is the resolution of the display. Since the Rift shows a 1,080-by-1,200 picture to each eye, and the virtual screen appears as a floating object, it's actually smaller than the headset's per-eye resolution. That means text can appear blurry and grainy unless you find a sweet spot from which to look at the screen, and reading can cause eye strain. That said, watching video on Hulu and Netflix is very cool.

Conclusions

The Oculus Rift comfortably produces an immersive, crisp virtual reality experience that will continue to improve with the development of new software, which has been steadily coming out on both the Oculus store and SteamVR. The release of the Oculus Touch controllers and the addition of them to the $600 headset package further adds to the value, though the HTC Vive's recent cut to $599 puts them on equal footing in price and features. Both are technically impressive, powerful VR headsets, but our Editors' Choice remains the PlayStation VR for its lower price and ease of use (though it only works with the PlayStation 4, rather than a PC).

If you want to try virtual reality, but you don't want to spend at least $400, the Samsung Gear VR and Google Daydream View are solid choices. They're smartphone-based VR headsets that offer some of the best mobile VR experiences you can currently get for around $100. However, you need a compatible phone to use them.

About the Author

Will Greenwald has been covering consumer technology for a decade, and has served on the editorial staffs of CNET.com, Sound & Vision, and Maximum PC. His work and analysis has been seen in GamePro, Tested.com, Geek.com, and several other publications. He currently covers consumer electronics in the PC Labs as the in-house home entertainment expert, reviewing TVs, media hubs, speakers, headphones, and gaming accessories. Will is also an ISF Level II-certified TV calibrator, which ensures the thoroughness and accuracy of all PCMag TV reviews. See Full Bio